George Santayana: 1863-1952: Philosopher

In spite of these reactions, Santayana was productive at Harvard. Between 1896 and World War I he produced several works that catapulted him to the top rank of American philosophy occupied by James, John Dewey, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. The Sense of Beauty was a complete theory of aesthetics, and Interpretations of Poetry and Religion linked those two forms of human endeavor as expressions of a common effort to represent human ideals. The Life of Reason; or The Phases of Human Progress was a giant work exploring the nature and role of reason in human civilization. Santayana also published two books of poetry, a study of the philosophically oriented poets Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe, various other works, and numerous essays. Although his works were difficult to grasp in their entirety, they were readable and full of quotable aphorisms, and well-educated readers took to them vigorously. Santayana became part of the American image of what a philosopher should be, and later in his life he even appeared on the cover of Time magazine.

In 1912 Santayana's mother died and left him a $10,000 inheritance—not a luxurious sum, but enough to allow Santayana to resign his position at Harvard and devote the rest of his career to living a simple life of the mind. He left the United States permanently, disillusioned by what he called the "genteel tradition" (another phrase that entered the American language) in American thought even though he admired the country's energy and imagination. "The good things" about America, he wrote in a letter quoted in the Wilson Quarterly, "are football, kindness, and jazz bands." Santayana spent years during World War I mostly in England. Between the two world wars, he traveled heavily around Europe, likening himself to a wandering student of the medieval era. He lived in France and Spain before settling in Rome, Italy in the mid-1920s.

Much of Santayana's time in the late 1920s and 1930s was taken up by a mammoth four-volume work entitled The Realm of Being, a systematic summary of his ideas about the nature of being. These volumes introduced Santayana's concept of essences—basic elements of the structure of existence that humans cannot know, but that nevertheless shape the way humans know, think, and believe. Santayana wrote several highly readable and challenging volumes of memoirs in his later years. During World War II he lived a contemplative life, largely untroubled by the carnage going on around him. Now in his eighties, Santayana was cared for in a convent by a group of English nuns. After the war he penned a bestseller entitled The Idea of Christ in the Gospels; that book, which sold out the day it was published, treated the Passion story as an inspirational legend rather than as literal truth.

The aged Santayana was the subject of a famed poem, "To an Old Philosopher in Rome," written by his former student Wallace Stevens. He continued to write until shortly before his death in Rome on September 26, 1952. Partly owing to an occasional but persistent anti-Semitic strain in his writings, Santayana's reputation declined in the years after his death. In the 1980s and 1990s, however, scholars began to investigate his legacy, publishing new editions of his writings and undertaking studies of his thought. A biography of the philosopher by John McCormick was published in 1987.